Columnists

In a situation as fast-moving as the Oscar Grant BART shooting death and its aftermath, it’s important to continue to collate and evaluate information on the run, even as we move forward. Such evaluation is going to be imperfect, of course, both because many things are still unknown, and we don’t yet have the historian’s benefit of the time and space needed to trigger the clarity of hindsight. But if we don’t take a breath and look around and make some preliminary conclusions as we go, there are many important things that will be forever lost.
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When Barack Obama becomes the 44th president of the United States, he’ll face daunting challenges: a shattered economy, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and global climate change, to mention only three.
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A couple of weeks back, I got an e-mail from a reader suggesting a column about the Berkeley parrot flock. In trying to pull that column together, I was struck by how little I knew about these birds—in contrast to their celebrity cousins in San Francisco.
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During inspections, I often hear people refer to old houses as having “good bones.” This is such a trigger for me that I have to duct-tape my mouth shut to keep from launching into a harangue on what is good and bad about old houses. Luckily for me, when I sit down to my computer, I can digitally rant all day long. There’s no duct tape on my keyboard. So here goes:
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